Fabulous Science

Fact and Fiction in the History of Scientific Discovery
Erscheinungsjahr 2004
ISBN: 978-0-19-860939-1
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 129 mm x 198 mm, Gewicht: 221 g

The great biologist Louis Pasteur suppressed 'awkward' data because it didn't support the case he was making. John Snow, the 'first epidemiologist' was doing nothing others had not done before. Gregor Mendel, the supposed 'founder of genetics' never grasped the fundamental principles of 'Mendelian' genetics. Joseph Lister's famously clean hospital wards were actually notorious dirty. And Einstein's general relativity was only 'confirmed' in 1919 because an eminent British scientist cooked his figures. These are just some of the revelations explored in this book.

Drawing on current history of science scholarship, Fabulous Science shows that many of our greatest heroes of science were less than honest about their experimental data and not above using friends in high places to help get their ideas accepted. It also reveals that the alleged revolutionaries of the history of science were often nothing of the sort. Prodigiously able they may have been, but the epithet of the 'man before his time' usually obscures vital contributions made their unsung contemporaries and the intrinsic merits of ideas they overturned. These distortions of the historical record mostly arise from our tendency to read the present back into the past. But in many cases, scientists owe their immortality to a combination of astonishing effrontery and their skills as self-promoters.

Zielgruppe

General readers with an interest in science and history, and in science with a human face, historians of science, scientists and science writers

Autoren/Hrsg.

Waller, John

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Populärwissenschaftliche Werke
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Naturwissenschaften, Technik, Medizin
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wissenschafts- und Universitätsgeschichte
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Human- und Sozialwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- List of illustrations

- Acknowledgements

- Introduction: what is history for?

- Part 1: Right for the wrong reasons

- 1: The pasteurization of spontaneous generation

- 2: 'The battle over the electron'

- 3: The eclipse of Isaac Newton: Arthur Eddington's 'proof' of general relativity

- 4: Very unscientific management

- 5: The Hawthorne studies: finding what you are looking for

- Conclusion to Part 1: sins against science?

- Part 2: Telling science as it was

- 6: Myth in the time of cholera

- 7: 'The priest who held the key': Gregor Mendel and the ratios of fact and fiction

- 8: Was Joseph Lister Mr Clean?

- 9: The Origin of Species by means of use-inheritance

- 10: 'A is for ape, B is for Bible': science, religion, and melodrama

- 11: Painting yourself into a corner: Charles Best and the discovery of insulin

- 12: Alexander Fleming's dirty dishes

- 13: 'A decoy of Satan'

- Conclusion to Part 2: sins against history?

- Notes on sources

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

John C. Waller was born in England in 1972. He gained a 'double first' in Modern History at the University of Oxford and went on to take Masters degrees in Human Biology and the History of Science and Medicine. He completed his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science at University College London in 2001. He is now a Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Melbourne, Australia.